As I understand things, Jon Skeet is the most successful stack overflow user at doing the things stack overflow users press up arrow for. And yet this blog discusses how the stack overflow company want a library of answers to all programming questions, while he has gatekeeper criteria for “good” programming questions.
It seems there is a disconnect between the goals of the company and the people who press the up arrows.
[related to the subject but tangential to this blog: there is also a huge opportunity indicated by the stack overflow user survey and here, to cater to the rest of the programmer community who are not young white male gatekeepers with a couple of years of JS experience who hate Perl, asm and ObjC]
People disagree a bit on exactly what a poor question is, but broadly, if you want a good answer you have to make your question worth the answerer’s time. The answerer’s reaction is the decisive test of whether your question is good. The company might want pageviews for all questions, not just good ones (as judged by the answerer), but everyone involved knows that without good answers pageviews will not be forthcoming. The disconnect is therefore insignificant.
As I understand things, Jon Skeet is the most successful stack overflow user at doing the things stack overflow users press up arrow for. And yet this blog discusses how the stack overflow company want a library of answers to all programming questions, while he has gatekeeper criteria for “good” programming questions.
It seems there is a disconnect between the goals of the company and the people who press the up arrows.
[related to the subject but tangential to this blog: there is also a huge opportunity indicated by the stack overflow user survey and here, to cater to the rest of the programmer community who are not young white male gatekeepers with a couple of years of JS experience who hate Perl, asm and ObjC]
The disconnect isn’t really there.
People disagree a bit on exactly what a poor question is, but broadly, if you want a good answer you have to make your question worth the answerer’s time. The answerer’s reaction is the decisive test of whether your question is good. The company might want pageviews for all questions, not just good ones (as judged by the answerer), but everyone involved knows that without good answers pageviews will not be forthcoming. The disconnect is therefore insignificant.